Melissa Hacker

Residency Period

Artist Details

Artist Intro

Melissa Hacker is a filmmaker who works with memory, history, family and loss. Melissa made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination and seen in film festivals, on television, in museums, and universities worldwide. Melissa’s video Venus was featured in the group show "Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art," in New York City, and screened in Vienna at the Josephinium Medical History Museum, where it was filmed. Melissa has been awarded a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna and artist residencies at Yaddo, VCCA, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Escape to Create, and Saltonstall. Melissa holds an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York Integrated Media Arts Program, and works as a wandering professor and film editor.

While in residency at DAS, Melissa will work on Ex Libris, a hybrid animated film that traces the vanished world of the graphic art collection her grandfather created and lost between the two world wars, revealing the intimate, intricate universe he devised, and the exploding world he recorded in his diaries.